Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty? Beauty, Style, and Felt Knowledge in Philosophical Writing
Date
2022
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Haverford College. Department of Philosophy
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Thesis
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eng
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Tri-College users only until 2023-01-01, afterwards Open Access.
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Abstract
Beauty is often considered to have no serious place in philosophy—at best a mere ornament and at worst the indication of poor or even dangerous philosophical writing. This designation is also often weaponized against philosophers whose writing style takes non-traditional forms, forcing them to justify their philosophy (and all too often themselves as philosophers) against a distinctly un-diverse canon of traditional philosophical writing, thus robbing the field of valuable philosophers and philosophy itself from the power and insight of their work, not to mention making the field a far more difficult environment for those who Kristie Dotson calls "diverse practitioners" of philosophy. In this thesis, I will examine the role of beauty in philosophical writing by focusing on the work of feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed. I will examine how style functions in Ahmed's writing, evaluate how existing arguments surrounding style in philosophical writing might account for the effectiveness of Ahmed's work, and posit my own argument as to how beautiful writing allows for a different kind of access to truth through felt knowledge.